Vara Winery Distillery - Isleta Pueblo

Had a wonderful tester of reds and white wines with large charcuterie board. Great.

Go to any other winery/tasting room and save yourself the disappointment of this establishment. We’ve eaten here three times. The first time the food and service were excellent. The second time the food was excellent but the service was terrible our server was a woman with a giant chest tattoo that certainly treated us like she had better things to do than her job. The third time the food and the service were absolute trash. We had the same server with the same entitled attitude and made us both feel uncomfortable. We ordered the paella bombas which had no seafood inside and when asked, the manager said it’s minced into the bombas. Not true. I crushed up all three bombas and found no meat or seafood, just dirty seafood water cooked rice. We also ordered the scallops which were absolutely the scallops from a frozen Trader Joe’s bag. They were tiny and incredibly fishy and covered in a thick lukewarm orange sauce similar to orange chicken sauce, which I assume was to cover how fishy they were. I asked if we could exchange them for the corn instead for those reasons and the server and manager both made us feel like we were putting them out, made no apology, gave no explanation, just “here’s your corn” with an attitude like we should apologize for expecting quality ingredients from food priced like it should be higher quality. We both finished our meal and left as quickly as we could seeing as our service practically stopped after that. Even in Albuquerque where the bar for service is generally very low, they somehow managed to knock that bar down to the ground. We will not be back until management steps up quality control of its servers and it’s food.

Be forewarned. I used to love coming here with coworkers after a long day. Unfortunately not like it used to be. Now they charge you a corking fee of $30 if you buy a bottle of wine and want to drink it onsite. Also when we asked for our bill I noticed that the tip was set at 35%, I changed it back to 20%. I called the manager on my why home thinking it was the waiter. I was told that unfortunately the app automatically defaults to this percentage and have been having issues. That she will tell the waiters to make sure they select no tip. Well if this was already an issue why were the waiters not told before? Definitely not going back.

What a great Santa Fe Tasting Room This was a delightful experience and look forward to returning soon! So much fun and just had to get a picture from instagram to share!

Quiet Little place with great wine and spirits. Good boards and tapas. Great for the whole family.